217w ago - A few weeks ago among some other work-arounds we reported on a project aiming to fix PlayStation 3 Blu-ray drives for those who downgraded their console, and today the group has released DRLTools DRLGen v0.90 suite offering an easy to use PS3 Blu-ray playback fix.

Our quest to restore BD playback for those PS3s that lost it after downgrading continues. Unfortunately our project suffered a serious setback last week when one of our discoveries was prematurely leaked: A potentially harmful and incomplete method to restore BD playback was disclosed by an attention-seeking individual. It should be noted that the fix in question is only a "band-aid" solution to the problem.

There is a very real possibility of future drive revocation resulting in PERMANENTLY broken playback! However, to make using it safer for those who wish to apply it, we have created this collection of DRL Tools. In the meantime we are continuing to work on a permanent and simple solution for all PS3s.

Each Blu-Ray movie contains a Media Key Block (MKB) as part of its copy protection scheme. Newer movies feature higher MKBs; the latest one is MKB v20. Addtionally, each BD movie has a unique encrypted title key. Both are stored inside the AACS/MKB_RO.inf file of each disc.

Fixing BD playback requires exact knowledge of which was the first instance of the highest MKB played so far. DRLgen can be used to identify the Blu-Ray movie with the highest MKB, and then create replacement DRL1/2 files for your PS3 which then restore BD playback.

REQUIREMENTS

1. A means to access Blu-Ray title discs to gather the AACS/MKB_RO.inf file, a Blu-Ray drive in a Mac / Windows PC makes the process easiest. Alternatively, SAK v1.0 can be installed as an OtherOS on the PS3 with firmware 3.15 or lower to accomplish this task.

2. Explicit knowledge of EVERY blu-ray title the blu-ray drive has played and the MKB versions of those discs. WARNING: While you can safely check every BD's MKB with DRLgen, you should limit the number of attempts of installing DRLs on the PS3, as the full details of the AACS "traitor tracking system" are not well known.

"If you downgraded without a DRL backup, or attempted the previous (not fully correct) leak then use DRLgen on a Windows System with a Bluray reader (or Linux on the PS3) to retrieve the MKB_RO.inf from /AACS from the highest MKB version blu-ray you played in your PS3.

Please Note: If you do not know which Bluray contains the highest version of MKB, you can use DRLgen multiple times to view MKB_RO.inf files in your collection to find the one Blu-ray that has the highest MKB version. You can do this by "Generating DRLs" multiple times, changing the disk each time. Be sure to keep careful records of what discs are what version.

Once you have obtained the bluray that has the highest MKB version that has been played by your PS3 prior to Downgrading. Place it into your BD in your PC, select the DRL Save location in the options of DRLgen that is your USB flash/pen drive, and "Generate DRL". Note: If you are using PS3 linux, or have copied the DRL from another system with a BD drive you may select the location where you have saved the MKB_RO.inf instead of navigating to the BD.)

At this point all paths come together, and there should be a folder on the root of the USB Flash/pen drive with a folder called 'PS3bluray' that contains just two files; dev_flash3_DRL1.bin and dev_flash3_DRL2.bin.

Place the USB drive into a running and Jailbroken PS3 and run DRLcopy on the PS3. This will create 2 backup files; dev_flash3_DRL1.bin.bak and dev_flash3_DRL2.bin.bak. These are backups of your PS3's DRL before copying the ones from USB. You should save them some where for safe keeping incase you ever need to restore them, or you have chosen the wrong version of a MKB_RO.inf.

Once this completes, exit jailbreak on the PS3 and attempt to play the Bluray as normal. This should now allow you to play blurays."

ABOUT THE TOOLS

DRLgen is a new and SAFER utility that uses the MKB_RO.inf from a Blu-Ray disc to derive correctly formatted DRL1 and DRL2 files easily every time. No difficult hex editing or byte-counting is involved.

It is important to note that DRLgen uses the AACS' specification for the MKB format and does not simply assume DRL records start at a specific position and are of a specific length. The previously leaked information makes all these assumptions and is flat out INCORRECT in many situations today, and is NOT future proof and could lead to permanently broken playback.

DRLbackup, previously released, has been updated to work in cooperation with the other two tools. As a best practice, a backup of the DRL1 / DRL2 files should be made prior to any system downgrade. Use in conjunction with DRLcopy for a completely recreatable process to downgrade your Large NAND PS3 and restore Blu-Ray playback in the future.

Note: The location of saved files has changed, users of the older version of the tool should place their saved DRL files into a 'PS3bluray' folder in the root of the USB storage device for compatability with the new DRLcopy tool.

DRLcopy is a new PS3 tool that uses the output of the new version of DRLbackup (or properly located DRL backups from the previous version) and/or the derived DRL files from DRLgen to restore your blu-ray functionality after a firmware downgrade.